Yashim Weekend (a Two-fer)

If you look to the right of this screen and scroll down a bit, Dear Reader, you will encounter the archive summary that I have captured and included to the left. Each triangle opens the months of a given year, with additional triangles revealing our individual posts. The parenthetical digits are a tally of our posts for each month and year.

The earliest years were our most active, with a brisk pace of two posts a week in 2011 and one and a half for a few more years, and averaging the titular one post per week for a few years after that. In 2018, alas, our pace has fallen off. With the holidays (which include a lot of comfort food and little time for experimentation) behind us and my sabbatical ahead of me, I decided that this weekend was my chance to build on last weekend's success and try to establish a stronger pace for the new year.

I was ambitious enough to bring Jason Goodwin's Yashim Cooks Istanbul: Culinary Adventures in the Ottoman Kitchen to our weekend house, and lazy enough to select two of its easier (or so it seemed) recipes.

I did not realize until after the fact (thanks to my favorite librarian) that January is National Soup Month. I am glad that my choice for a simple dinner Friday evening was a lentil soup, perhaps the simplest recipe in the whole book and ideal for Friday evening. It is the first recipe attempted by the fictional detective Yashim in the mystery series that led to the creation of this most unusual cookbook.

For this I sautéed onions and garlic in a mix of butter and olive oil (decadent!) and then added a potato (peeled and hand-shredded), red lentils, vegetable stock (in lieu of the called-for chicken stock), and a few spices.

This simmered for about a half hour; in the final few minutes, I prepared the soup's topping. I heated olive oil in our indispensable cast-iron skillet and stirred in mint leaves and a combination of crushed red peppers and paprika. This was the perfect compliment to the rather subtle flavor and creamy texture of the soup itself. Next time I'll search look in different grocery for the pul biber Turkish pepper and I will use more of the mint, since it shrivels.

Yashim Cooks

Buoyed by the success of the soup, I tried something a bit more ambitious on leisure-cooking Saturday. Chicken with pomegranate and walnut seems to be among the simplest recipes in the book, and though it was not complicated, I should have started it a bit earlier in the afternoon than I did. The first step was to prepare a pomegranate syrup. Since I could not find it in our local grocery, I followed the simple recipe that Goodwin provides on the page before the main recipe.

This is really just a simple syrup -- he calls for 1.5 pints of pomegranate juice, 1 cup of sugar, and the juice of one lemon. He cautions that this is more of an activity than a recipe, and advises "vigorous and relentless stirring" for up to an hour. So I turned on my WBUR app and settled into my whisking zone. At the time I made the video above, all was going well, though I was beginning to wonder about the crucial word "until" in the directions, as in "until it reduces to a syrup."

I have made other syrups, and used what has worked before, which is simply a wild guess that when the volume had been reduced by about 2/3, it would be close to ready. I was, in fact, afraid that it might be a bit thin. My relentless vigor, it turned out, was for naught. As soon as I removed the pan from heat, the syrup began to adhere to the sides, quickly dry out, and smoke. I tried to salvage what was left by pouring it into a bowl, but the physics were still operating the same way. When I got back from disarming the smoke detector in the hallway, there was just a couple ounces of syrup, rapidly reducing. I poured it into yet another bowl, forming a perfect hard shell.

An hour into the process -- but all caught up with the TED Radio Hour -- I turned the page to the recipe at hand. Fortunately, I had prepped a few things with my non-whisking hand. This dish begins with browning chicken thighs, and then removing them to a plate. In the same pan, I sautéed onions until translucent and then returned the chicken to the pan, on top of the onions. I added water (broth was another option) and later finely chopped walnuts (Goodwin suggested a mortar or electric blender, but I just minced madly for a while), turmeric, a few other spices,

At the end, I generously garnished with the seeds of one pomegranate. The result was quite delicious, despite the absence of pomegranate syrup, and I will definitely try this again. But I will leave the question of "until" to the professionals by purchasing the syrup somewhere.

Watch this space for more Yashim cooking. We have been in Istanbul only once, during a layover last year on our way to Jordan.  Our experience -- though quite brief -- of food in that part of the world is my motivation to delve more deeply into this volume!

Lagniappe: I am posting a teaser here about National Clam Chowder Day -- February 25 -- in hopes that readers will help me remember that one a couple days ahead of time (as I will need to plan a visit to the fishmongers).